Lessons from Social Media Marketing World 2019

Social Media Marketing World is three days of social media gurus sharing their knowledge, the latest tactics, and technology with thousands of marketers from a host of different industries. Even though I wasn’t in attendance, it’s amazing what you can glean from…

wait for it…

social media.

This article provides a round-up of important concepts and advice from the conference as well as a few questions to help you consider how they apply to your business.

Critical Things About Life That Are Changing the Way We Market (or should be)

In author and podcaster Mark Schaefer’s keynote entitled Social Media Reimagined: How to Adapt in a World Without Loyalty, he discussed that what worked for us once, is no longer viable.

Marketers are facing the following problems:

●Advertising is dying because people see it for what it is.

●The customer is unreachable●You can’t buy your way in●You have to be invited

Questions to consider: how will you be invited in? What are you doing in order to get their attention, get them to know who you are enough to invite you in, and make them want to?

Tips for Humanizing Your Brand

We hear the word humanizing an awful lot these days. It’s encouraged to humanize your brand to develop a closer relationship with people who are interested in you. It will help your audience get to know, like, and trust you. Bryan Kramer, the “Zen Master of Marketing” said that there are three key elements in your brand becoming more human:

Question to think about: how can you start thinking more H2H (human to human) business instead of B2B or B2C?

User Mistakes in Instagram Stories

Social media and personal branding strategist Tyler McCall shared what most people aren’t doing right on Instagram Stories:

●Not having a reason behind what you’re doing there. It may seem like a pretty site, but if you’re there for business there must be a strategy behind what you’re doing.●Allowing perfect to trump value. Find out what your ideal audience wants and needs and give them the value they want.●Not using Stories to tell stories. It’s set up for that so why are so many people failing to use it for its intended purpose?

Question for you: are you using the popular visual site to tell your business story or are you just posting pretty pictures? There’s nothing wrong with just posting pretty pictures but if you want to meet business goals using the site, you need to be deliberate about what you post.

If you’d like to see more of the social media goodness you missed at the conference, check out the Twitter hashtag: #SMMW19.

This roundup is one of my favorite things about Twitter and social media. Even when you’re not fortunate enough to attend a professional conference, you can still connect with those who attended and learn a little bit of what they did. It may not take the place of all the fabulous connections you’d have made had you attended in person but it certainly gives you some good insights into what you could be doing with your business and those insights could become the beginning of future paths to growing your business.

Christina R. Green teaches small businesses, chambers, and associations how to connect through content. Her articles have appeared in the Midwest Society of Association Executives’ Magazine, NTEN.org, AssociationTech, and WritersWeekly. She is a regular blogger at Frankjkenny.com and the Event Manager Blog.

Christina is an introverted writer on a quest to bring great storytelling to organizations everywhere.